The Ontario Ministry of Finance manages the province’s fiscal, financial and related regulatory affairs while the Ontario Ministry of Revenue, founded in 2007, administers the province's major tax statues, tax credit and benefit programs. RealDecoy helped both clients define their web accessibility standards for disabled people.
RealDecoy has mitigated the risk associated with making web documentation accessible on short timelines on a number of high profile projects for both ministries. The two ministries regularly turn to us for our deep knowledge of web accessibility and risk management/mitigation, and our familiarity with their practices and processes.
The Ministry turned to RealDecoy once again in 2006 when the Tax Revenue Division was combined with the Ministry of Finance.
THE CHALLENGE
A Content Management System: the missing link
The Ministry did not have a CMS for its website—a significant problem given that it planned to move towards a long-term content management solution in the future. The organization needed a placeholder CMS to work with in the meantime.
Combining two sites into one
The Ministry and the TRD had two distinct sites with very different information architectures. The two sites needed to be integrated to create a single site with an architecture that would serve the content from both sites.
The site was massive to begin with and the Ministry wanted to add thousands more pages. RealDecoy had to ensure that the site remained fully operational while the additions were being made. In addition, the Ministry wanted a few advanced features integrated into the site such as a breadcrumb navigation system.
OUR SOLUTION
An interim CMS solution
RealDecoy came up with an interim CMS solution that didn’t use a proprietary format, allowing the Ministry to later pull information for use as part of the long-term solution. We built the site using Macromedia (now Adobe) Contribute as a way for non-technical users to manage the content and integrated it into a MySQL database to manage the content. This approach was cost effective for the Ministry and also gave them the most flexibility for migrating to a more robust CMS in the future.
Ongoing successes
The Ministry engaged RealDecoy again in 2007 when it formed the Ministry of Revenue. RealDecoy worked with both ministries to split the Ministry of Finance site into separate Finance and Revenue sites using a common look and feel.
After the success of these projects, the Ontario Expert Commission on Pensions—a commission that examines the legislation that governs the funding of defined benefit pension plans in the province—engaged RealDecoy to undertake accessibility work on its site.
RealDecoy transformed the Ontario Ministry of Finance’s 2003 budgetary papers from PDF to accessible HTML versions.
THE CHALLENGE
High profile, tight deadline
As with the original website redesign project, these papers needed to be ready by a legally mandated deadline. In 2003, RealDecoy only had three days to post this material to the Ministry’s website. Given the potential for backlash from the disabled community if this important content was not properly accessible, risk management played a huge role in the creation of this section of the site.
OUR SOLUTION
Creating the standards
RealDecoy created standards for posting information to the Ministry’s website based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, as required under the ODA. We delivered the 2003 version of the site, as well as all subsequent iterations, on time.
As part of this project, RealDecoy developed a set of custom-built quality assurance tools for the Ministry that it still uses today: TableConvert and TableTest.
RealDecoy created a website for the Ontario Ministry of Finance that is accessible to disabled people, as mandated by the Ontarians with Disabilities Act (ODA).
THE CHALLENGE
Meeting accessibility standards
In 2002, the Ontario government passed the ODA requiring all government websites to meet certain accessibility guidelines for disabled people. As a result, the Ontario Ministry of Finance needed to make changes to its website to meet these new guidelines.
Given our experience working on sites with accessibility standards, the Ministry called on RealDecoy to plan, architect and redevelop its site in early 2003. The Tax Revenue Division (TRD) within the Ministry also needed to make changes to the Content Management System (CMS) it was using to make its site more accessible.
The websites contained approximately 18,000 pages of content in French and English, and needed to be fully content managed with a Web Content Management System (WCMS).
A risky undertaking
The short timelines associated with this project made it a risky one; the changes to the site had to be completed by the end of the Ministry’s fiscal year, March 2003. Failure to do so would have reflected poorly on the Ministry in the disabled community and within government as the deadline was legally mandated.
OUR SOLUTION
Establishing accessibility standards
RealDecoy developed a strategy for the adoption of standards for disabled people and applied these standards to the existing content on the Ministry of Finance’s website. We ultimately chose accessibility standards based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines, widely regarded as the international standard for Web accessibility.
RealDecoy worked with the Ministry’s development team to offer guidance on generating HTML code that was compliant. We spent three days at the Ministry converting materials into accessible HTML according to W3C WAI standards.
We also reviewed the processes the Ministry was using to manage its website, audit material, make enhancement recommendations and perform quality assurance.
A tailored Content Management System
Working with the TRD’s technology vendor we were able to make their CMS editor and other components of the system generate code that met the required accessibility standards.
Our success
RealDecoy delivered an accessible site on deadline. And we were later engaged to make the Ministry’s budget and fall statement pages accessible—work we’ve been brought in to do every year since 2003.
